


the one who was left behind / the one who stayed

by cellorocket



Category: Psycho-Pass
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-16
Updated: 2016-09-12
Packaged: 2018-04-26 14:11:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5007766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cellorocket/pseuds/cellorocket
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>collection of tumblr prompts for psycho pass, primarily featuring ginoza nobuchika</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> kougino + things you said with too many miles between us

He gets the call from an untraceable number, but he knows it’s Kogami even before he answers. He knows it in some deep place, with a shiver of recognition beneath the skin, where the heart lies dormant. It’s always Kogami, even when it isn’t. 

“Hey,” he says, and for a moment Ginoza is ten years younger, sitting beneath a wide-branched tree, gazing into his friend’s amused expression as he beckons with a little grin. Hey Gino, c’mere, and though he’s angry he misses the ritual so acutely that for a moment he can’t breathe. Kogami always sounded so at ease with himself, secure in the world and its workings, even when it was falling apart around him. Ginoza could never manage the same.

“Where are you.” His voice is flat. 

“You know I can’t tell you that.”

“Can’t, or won’t?” 

“Gino …” 

They’re both quiet, the silence only cut by crackling interference. Ginoza thinks he can hear the rumble of a car engine, and he imagines Kogami in the backseat of some beat-up antique, jostling with each bump in the dusty road, silhouetted by sunset. The windows would be down so he could feel the breeze on his face. He would breathe deeply, to the bottom of his stomach, letting the free air fill him. His eyes would be closed. 

“What do you want?” 

“I heard they made you an Enforcer,” Kogami tells him, which isn’t really an answer. Ginoza doesn’t feel like shooting the shit or indulging his old friend’s sense of ironic curiosity; that old anger rears up like a disturbed animal, and it makes him sharp. 

“What do you want, Kogami?” 

Crackling silence descends once again. The days when they could sit at each other’s side and enjoy an easy quiet are long gone; now, though many miles separate them, they are connected by a different sort of quiet, one that is tense and hurting, one made of misunderstandings and words unsaid. A quiet stitched from regret. 

“I’m sorry,” Kogami says finally, and his voice is anything but sure.

Before, Ginoza might have argued. If you were sorry, you would have done things differently, he’d have said, and felt right in doing so. You would have stayed. But the quiet speaks for him. Kogami is the one who leaves, and Ginoza is the one who is left behind, and this was always going to be true. They both know it already. “I am too.” 

There isn’t anything left to say, but neither can bear to end the call quite yet. Instead, they listen to the other breathe. Perhaps Kogami sits in the back of that dusty car and imagines Ginoza in his new quarters, with Dime’s head in his lap. Imagines him scrubbing at his face, head tipped down, shoulders curling. C’mere, Gino, he’d have said when they were young, throwing his arm around Ginoza’s shoulder, holding him steady. C’mere.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ginaka + breeze

Akane watched the wind carry curling plumes of smoke into the blue, wisps as fine as gossamer, spun-cotton cirrus. It was too brisk for the scent of smoke to stick to her clothes; she always came back inside smelling like cold, like a gun left outside too long. But there was something about the force of habit; around evening her fingers would itch for the feel of a cigarette between them, the encroaching ember nicking fine skin. She felt oddly frustrated on the shifts when she couldn’t steal away for the ritual.

A gust rattled the panes of glass behind her, knocking a clump of ash loose from the end of her cigarette. She thought wistfully of her coat slung across the back of her chair. At this point, it would be more convenient to finish her cigarette rather than go back inside for it and start the ritual all over again, but that didn’t lessen the bite of the cold, cutting through the fabric of her suit jacket, too thin to be of much use. She shivered, chaffing her arm with her free hand.

The city spread out before her – austere spires in the deepening twilight, the streets carpeted by the slow, steady crawl of blinking taillights, like ants across a blanket. It had been quiet these last few weeks, but it was the kind that made Akane nervous – one that thrums with the possibility of sound. She stared hard at the dark alleys between buildings, darkened windows, the faded spaces between pinpricks of light, as if by the force of her earnestness could she see the first whisper of trouble before even Sibyl knew of it.

“Tsunemori,” came a familiar voice – coolly professional, as it only ever was at work, yet the sound warmed her.

She smiled, tapping the loose ash over the rail. “I’ll just be another minute.”

“There’s no hurry,” Ginoza said as he joined her. She saw after a moment that her jacket was in his arms, and he offered to her with a little quirk of his mouth. “I thought you might want this.”

She took it gratefully, her smile widening into something a little warmer, a little more genuine. “You think of everything.”

He shrugged modestly. “If only that were true.”

They stood in comfortable silence, listening to the traffic below, the wind rattling the glass behind them. The years had softened him, she thought as she studied him. He stared at the places she had been looking, the dark corners – an old habit she was encouraged to see that they shared. His mouth was less severe, given more to smiling and sarcasm, however cool it might be. His eyes brighter, his posture less rigid (if no less composed). After two years with the prosthetic, he had acclimated to its weight. Sometimes she looked at him and saw shadows of his father in his eyes, a fleeting resemblance that made her chest ache; sometimes she saw traces of the young man Kogami had known and left. Sometimes she saw him looking at her.

“Are you alright?” he asked her after a long while.

“Eh? Of course, Ginoza-san. I’m just thinking.”

He nodded at the cigarette notched between her fingers, the ember dangerously close. “You seem especially distracted today.”

That was the problem with spending time with an old-school detective, an unintentional reincarnation of his father’s closest ambition; there were no secrets. He could lift the truth from her expression almost without trying. “I was thinking about Kogami,” she admitted after awhile. It was mostly true, anyway. The scent of his favorite cigarettes jogged her memory, brought her back to those heady days watching him tease apart a problem, watching the way his whip-crack mind worked, fascinated. Ginoza had been so remote then, and Kogami so close; who could have known that their positions would slowly reverse, revert to their natural state? Kogami was the one who left, he was always the one who left.

Ginoza sighed, shoulders dropping. “That would distract anyone.” And she remembered there were deeper hurts than the one she knew, tender places left raw even after so many years.

“It’s almost settled for me,” she explained, pulling her jacket tighter. “But … do you know that feeling, where even though it’s done you still worry about it – you still worry about them, and worry if you did the right thing, or if there was anything more you could have done to stop it, or to fix it. And even if you chase down all the possibilities and how it wouldn’t have changed anything, you still wonder. There’s always something you didn’t think of.”

“Better than I’d like,” he said.

Of course he’d know, he’d know it better than her. For a second she felt like the novice Inspector she’d been only two years ago, untouched by all that weighed on her now, unaware of what she would see. “I don’t know how to settle that part,” she said, looking away.

He was quiet for a long time, craning up at the November sky, watching the distant passage of a jet overhead. It was almost dark, and the chill grew sharp. “I’m not sure you can,” he said at last. “That part’s never settled for me either. But Tsunemori, you did everything you could – you did more than most would have.” She couldn’t look at him now, at those painfully earnest eyes, not without aching in a thousand ways. “Sometimes you can think of all the possibilities and account for them perfectly, and it still turns out badly. So what then? He was always going to leave – the circumstances might have been different, but they would have led to the same place.”

“If only Ginoza-san from two years ago could hear you now,” she said, smiling – that man would have rebelled at this with all the force of a principle violated; you could always plan, you could always control the outcome, if you were good enough. They both knew better now.

After a moment he smiled too, ducking his head. “Maybe you settle it by looking forward.”

It might have seemed impossible before, but she looked at him and his smile and his eyes and thought that maybe she could, maybe they both could.


End file.
